Today (April 4th), the Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University announced in Changsha that three cases of domestic robotic surgery pioneered by the hospital in China have been successfully completed within the last week. This is the first time that the self-developed surgical robot system in China has been used clinically, marking China's move out of an autonomous path for surgical robots and breaking the global monopoly of surgical robot technology.

According to Zhu Shanhong, Deputy Director of Xiangya Third Hospital, three cases of surgery were performed on March 26, March 31 and April 2. The patients were two middle-aged men and a middle-aged woman. The man admitted to the hospital was diagnosed as gastric perforation with diffuse peritonitis and the other two were appendicitis. After ethical review and informed consent, the hospital underwent "laparoscopic exploration + robot assisted gastric perforation repair" and "laparoscopic exploration + robot assisted appendectomy" under general anesthesia. The patient's condition remained stable after surgery. Two male patients recovered well.

urgical robot is essentially an "endoscopic surgical instrument control system", which is generally composed of three parts: a doctor's console, a robotic arm system, and a 3D imaging system. During the operation, the doctor operates on the console and observes the operation. The system transmits the doctor's movement signal to the robot arm through the“remote control”and translates it into a synchronous and real action of the robot in the patient's body to complete the surgery.

The surgical robot system used this time was jointly developed by Tianjin University, Central South University and other units. It adopts a master-slave operation mode and is equipped with a doctor's console and a robotic trolley. In the middle of the doctor's console, there are two sets of main operating handles and a control panel. The display box is integrated on the top of the console to "view" the real-time three-dimensional surgical scene information in the patient. The robotic trolley includes three slave robots, and the "hands" at the ends have 3 to 4 degrees of freedom, allowing quick "grabbing" and "replacement" of surgical instruments.

Wang Shuxin, Dean of the School of Mechanical Engineering of Tianjin University, told reporters that the main hardware, software, materials and system design of the surgical robot are all independently developed by China and have independent intellectual property rights. Thanks to the innovative wire drive decoupling design technology and lightweight reconfigurable system design, the robot's body is lighter and more compact than foreign ones, the cost is lower, and modular assembly is possible. It is a new type of cavity. The microscope-assisted surgical robot system has comparable performance to similar foreign equipment.

Reducing the patient's surgical trauma has always been an important goal of modern medicine. In the 1980s, the application of laparoscopy opened the era of“minimally invasive”surgery; the surgical robot born at the beginning of the 21st century pushed surgery to the“third generation”. Compared with the first-generation laparotomy and the second-generation minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, the robotic surgery can make the surgical field more clear, the operation more delicate and accurate, and help the doctor to complete longer in the sitting position. Time complicated surgery.

Experts said that the surgical robot system is suitable for the following surgical procedures: First, robotic surgery such as cholecystectomy and appendectomy that has no effect on conventional laparoscopic surgery; and second, hepatic lobectomy and complex biliary reconstruction can significantly improve the effect of laparoscopic surgery. The robotic surgery; Third, visceral aneurysm resection and anastomosis, intra-abdominal lymph node dissection and other laparoscopic surgery is difficult to accurately complete some of the surgery. Although the three surgeries performed this time were relatively simple, the ability to implement more complex surgeries was technically available.

It is understood that in developed countries, the surgical robot system represented by the United States "Da Vinci" has been widely used in general surgery, urology, cardiothoracic surgery and other fields, and has achieved great success. In recent years, a group of well-known domestic hospitals, including the General Hospital of the Chinese People's Liberation Army and Peking Union Medical College Hospital, have also begun to introduce the technology from abroad. The successful launch of domestic robotic surgery has made China one of the few countries to master the technology from equipment research and development to clinical research. The long-term dependency of high-end medical equipment such as surgical robots on imports is expected to change significantly.